Project description
Across the last decades, young adults’ experiences of family transitions, like leaving the parental home, cohabitation, and the transition to parenthood, have diversified in Western societies. The heterogeneity in the timing and order of these transitions has increased, and it is not uncommon that transitions are delayed or skipped entirely. For example, there is an increase in the number of young adults living alone, and in the proportion of individuals who, by choice or involuntarily, do not have children. The increasing heterogeneity goes together with changes in societal norms about what is considered appropriate - ‘off-time’ and ‘on-time’ - at certain ages.

The relaxed norms related to adulthood have opened up the potential for individual dispositions, such as personality, to play a more focal role in shaping people’s family trajectories (e.g., partnering or not). At the same time, family trajectories can trigger changes in personality and well-being. According to theories on personality and well-being, people who follow a normative sequence of family transitions (e.g., getting married before having children) might show more positive personality change (e.g., increases in conscientiousness) compared to people who deviate from this path. Yet, many young Dutch people in contemporary cohorts deviate from these normative pathways. The proposed project aims to understand what happens in these contemporary cohorts when individuals do not follow the family trajectory that is “normatively prescribed”. By combining insights from family sociology, personality psychology, and methodology, our goal is to the provide the most complete picture of the interplay between family trajectories and psychological development in young adulthood to date. We focus on two research questions:

1. Which demographic, social, and psychological (e.g., personality) variables predict who deviates from the normative occurrence, order, and timing of family transitions (e.g., moving out of the parental household, moving in with a partner, and having children)?
2. Do deviations in occurrence, order, and timing of family transitions relate to differences in how young adults develop, in terms of personality and well-being (i.e., life satisfaction, loneliness, self-esteem)?

For all papers, the PhD student will use representative longitudinal data. The amount of within-person longitudinal data on demographic changes and psychological development have been accumulating across the last decades but has not been used to its full potential. The underuse of these data can to a large extent be attributed to the fact that analyzing such datasets requires rather specialized statistical knowledge and skills. The analysis of complex longitudinal data and clustering techniques are a crucial part of this project. We will particularly focus on the rich data available in the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel, and where needed supplement the LISS panel with our own questionnaires.

Job description
The PhD project is part of a collaboration between the Department of Developmental Psychology, the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Methodology, funded by The Herbert Simon Research Institute at Tilburg School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The first two years, the PhD student will work at the Department of Developmental psychology. After two years, we will discuss whether the PhD student will join either the Department of Sociology or the Department of Methodology. 

Responsibilities are: 

• Planning and executing data collection, independently conducting complex longitudinal data-analyses (e.g., latent growth curve modelling)
• Active participation in the team involved in this project and in the Departments (e.g., by attending departmental meetings)
• Writing international scientific publications 
• Presenting at national and international scientific conferences and disseminating findings to a non-scientific audience (e.g., policy makers and mental health care professionals)
• Teaching and supervision (e.g., supervision of bachelor theses and POP groups, max 0.2 FTE)